Thursday, August 10, 2006

This summer my main to-do’s have been to make my yearly report to Teesside and to start building a MUD. Before I go to Tokyo Tech (I’ll be visiting scholar in professor Nakajima's group this autumn) I aim to have the basic functional framework done for the MUD. I gave the MUD the working name “World of Minds” since the reason for building it is to get a test environment for the Mind Module. It is SO FUN to build it! I scrapped all my principles of what processes to use when building software and designing games since I’m on my own!– no one is dependent on me in this and I’m not dependent on anyone. Wheeeee – its just to hack away and play around as much as want to! I can throw in champagne, Hell-muppets and flying scythe monkeys and and and… Yesterday I realized I need some sort of order not to get lost myself, so I set up a wiki for World of Minds – manual, design document and other useful data. While I was at it – in documentation mode so to speak – I set up a home page for myself as well.

The most important thing that has happened this summer is that I have gotten married! We, my husband (!) Rauno and I, decided to ignore social conventions of how to match invitation cards with handbags and god knows what… we eloped to Bali instead! So now I am Mrs Palosaari-Eladhari. If any of my unmarried friends starts to plan a wedding, my strong recommendation would be to keep quiet and book a trip to the paradase - which is Bali. Gunilla who has the travel agency organising it fixed everything - even the clothes. We just relaxed and let other people pamper us. The morning of the wedding we went diving (Rauno got his diving certificate on the trip) and then had drinks in the pool before the hairdresser, make up artist and masseuse arrived!